The Bow and the Lyre

Transcription

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2 The Bow and the Lyre

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4 The Bow and the Lyre A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey Seth Benardete ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham Boulder New York Toronto Plymouth, UK

5 ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright 1997 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. First paperback edition, 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Cataloging in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Benardete, Seth. The bow and the lyre : a Platonic reading of the Odyssey / Seth Benardete. p. cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN (cl. : alk. paper) ISBN (cl. : alk. paper) ISBN 10: (alk. paper) ISBN 13: (alk. paper) eisbn 10: eisbn 13: Homer. Odyssey. 2. Odysseus (Greek mythology) in literature. 3. Epic poetry, Greek History and criticism. 4. Philosophy, Ancient, in literature. 5. Plato. I. Title. PA4037.B dc20 CIP Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z

6 The Odyssey: Depth of thought with a surface simplicity Eustathius

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8 Contents Notice to the Reader Preface 1 The Beginnings 1 Theodicy, 1 Politics, 6 Telemachus, 11 2 Pattern and Will 17 Nestor, 17 Helen and Menelaus, 24 3 Odysseus s Choice 33 4 Among the Phaeacians 45 Shame, 45 Paradise, 49 Pride, 52 5 Odysseus s Own Story 63 Memory and Mind, 63 Nature, 80 Hades, 90 Destiny, 98 6 Odysseus s Lies Nonfated Things 117 Theoclymenus and Eumaeus, 117 The Slave Girls, 124 The Name and the Scar, 128 vii ix xi

9 viii Contents 8 The Suitors and the City 131 The Suitors, 131 The City, Recognitions 143 Penelope, 143 Hades, 146 Laertes, 150 Notes 153 Index 173 About the Author 179

10 Notice to the Reader The text used for the Odyssey is Peter von der Mühll s third Teubner edition (1984). I have followed, largely, its readings and punctuation, but have not necessarily followed its indications of interpolation. In translating passages, I have omitted words and phrases if they are not essential for the interpretation. Passages I believe are interpolated are passed over without comment. Most citations in the text refer to either the Odyssey or the Iliad. Arabic numbers designate the books of the Odyssey, Roman numerals, those of the Iliad. ix

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12 Preface More than forty years ago, when I first studied Homer, I used something I found in Plato in order to understand the plot of the Iliad; and later, when I studied Aeschylus and Sophocles, the ways in which Plato laid bare the prepolitical and the political elements that constitute the structure of the city, seemed to me to be a guide for the interpretation of Prometheus, Seven against Thebes, Oedipus Tyrannus, and Antigone. In all these cases, Plato was there as a map or grid that allowed me to trace out faint trails in older authors who could not guide me, through no fault of their own, as well as Plato could. He seemed to me to have given the arguments for what Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles had only shown. Logos, one might say, opened the way to the understanding of paradigm. Although I was vaguely aware that it could seem forced and willful if Plato was always there ahead of me, it never bothered me very much, any more than if one is wandering in a dark wood one questions one s luck if one comes across a clearing in which one can again take one s bearings. So Plato did not have for me a history that could explain the uncanny match between map and terrain. It did not occur to me that Plato had learned from the poets, and what for me was a projection backward inverted the indebtedness of philosophy to poetry. I was still under the spell of the opposition between them, which Plato himself had established when he had Socrates speak of the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. The poets had originally been the wise before the philosophers had denied them the title and, despite the philosophers own protests, had had it bestowed on themselves. The poets wisdom was vulgar wisdom, made to dazzle a crowd of thirty thousand or more but incapable of standing up to a private argument (Symposium 175e2 6). If, however, there had been this constant anticipation in the poets of what Plato made explicit, xi

13 xii Preface it seemed one would have to resort to the notion that the poets said many beautiful things but did not know what they meant (Apology of Socrates 22c2 3). An occasional hit can well be artless, but a pattern of success makes one suspect that the dice are loaded. If they are loaded, the simple separation of poetry from philosophy is no longer possible. In principle, the blurring of the cut could entail the intrusion of the irrational into the rational rather than the spread of the rational over what formerly looked irrational; but I saw no reason to cast doubt on philosophic thinking, and rather I thought I saw a way to redraw the line between poetry and philosophy, or better, between some poets and Plato. This way involved Socrates second sailing, his own term for the turnaround in his own thinking when he abandoned a direct approach to cosmology and turned instead to speeches rather than to the beings. It was this turn in which I thought the poets had preceded him, for it had always been a puzzle to me how the principle of telling lies like the truth, upon which all of Greek poetry rests, could precede the telling of the truth, for it seemed obvious to me, as it had to Socrates, that one cannot lie knowingly unless one knows the truth. The Muses who tell Hesiod that they speak lies like the truth say they also tell the truth when they wish. If they do not separate them completely, the songs they sing should contain both lies and truth. In the nineteenth book of the Odyssey, Odysseus impersonates before Penelope a Cretan. He tells a story about Odysseus s stay with him when he was on his way to Troy. The story could well be completely true if Odysseus were not Odysseus. If Idomeneus had a younger brother, who did not go to Troy, and Idomeneus had left for Troy ten or eleven days before the arrival of Odysseus, then it could have happened that Odysseus stayed in Crete for twelve days and was kindly received by the Cretan Odysseus claims to be ( ). Immediately after Odysseus s tale, which, Homer says, was false but like the truth, he reports that Penelope on hearing it was streaming tears, and her skin was melting, just as when snow melts on the top of mountains; the East wind soon melts it when the West wind pours down, and the rivers are full when it melts; so her fair cheeks were melting as she poured out tears ( ). Homer juxtaposes his own lie with Odysseus s. Homer s lie is in the speech; Odysseus s is in the speaker. Homer s lie is an image that Homer declares through the simile to be an image and false. The simile gives the context for the literal meaning of melt after the verb has been extended to cover Penelope s tears. The tears are presented as if they were the overflow from a face in dissolution, and nothing would remain of Penelope herself except water. Homer s image sets the truth alongside the lie. The lie thus seems

14 Preface xiii superfluous; the passage could be rephrased and eliminate both the lie and the proof of the lie. It is unclear, however, whether the truth in the rephrasing would be any truer than the false in the lie. Penelope would not melt, but in not melting she could not account for Odysseus s pity in his heart as he looked upon her, or for his eyes standing fast as if they were of horn or iron ( ; cf ). One lie leads to another; together they make plain what the truth would not. Homer lets us look at two forms of the impossible. His own shows an impossibility that can never but be impossible; Odysseus s is conditionally impossible and could be the case if the speakers were different. Were we to generalize from our example, the poet puts together what never happened with what never happens; but if we stick to our example, the conditionally impossible involves the strictly impossible, since it assumes that Odysseus is himself and another, and this does not differ from the strictly impossible, for it too assumes that snow and cheek are not two but one. The poet, then, divides what is necessarily one and unites what is necessarily two. He practices his own kind of dialectic in which the truth shows up in two spurious forms. These two forms do not belong exclusively to the poet. Anytime we impersonate someone else, and we do so whenever we quote another directly, we are making one two; and anytime we speak nonliterally, and we almost always do so whenever we speak, we are making two one. 1 The poet, however, does the same systematically. We call this system the plot of poetic dialectic. The plot is the disclosure of impossibilities or apparent impossibilities. Through speech and action it discovers the things that conceal either two in one or one in two. Two in this formula stands for any number. It could not be, Oedipus says, that one could be equal to many (OT 845). Sophocles shows just how this impossible arithmetic computes. It is obviously a version of the riddle Oedipus himself solved, where four, three, and two were all one. Oedipus s name designates two things, knowledge and lameness. They are apparently together by accident and could be separated into Oedipus the man and Oedipus at birth; but the plot binds them together and solves the riddle Oedipus himself is. Odysseus has two names. One he gives himself; the other his grandfather gave him. Both are significant names, but they apparently signify utterly different things. The plot of the Odyssey connects them. At the peak of poetic dialectic stand the gods. 2 When Athena yanks Achilles hair as he is about to kill Agamemnon, it is easy to say that Homer has made one into two, and Achilles second thoughts are assigned a separate being; but Homer distinguishes elsewhere between second thoughts and a god. According to Plato, at least on one occasion (in Socra-

15 xiv Preface tes second speech in the Phaedrus), the ascent to the beings always passes divergently through the fiction of the Olympian gods. The gods are the representative of lies like the truth. They seem to combine impersonation with image making. They are both the spurious other of a one and the spurious one of a two: Eros is commonly understood to be both lover and beloved. We did not know before we turned to the Odyssey whether the poets themselves had anticipated Plato in this regard, or if they had pointed out to him this way of understanding their own doing or making but had stopped short of it themselves. If they had stopped short, we would know why it seemed that Plato was so sure a guide to the poets, and still the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy would be preserved. If, however, they had not stopped short, then Plato would have recovered a way of thinking that is not on the way to philosophy but is philosophy, and the apparent tension between Plato the poet and Plato the philosopher would disappear. My teacher, the late Leo Strauss, had often spoken to me about this possibility, but I did not know then what he really meant, and I do not know now whether what I think I now understand was what he really meant. This book, in any case, was written to explore the possibility he indicated. I am grateful to the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung for giving me a fellowship for the spring and summer of 1994 in order to write this book. To the chairman of its board, Heinz Gumin, and its director, Heinrich Meier, I am particularly grateful for making my stay so enjoyable. I also wish to thank my students with whom over the years I have studied the Odyssey, and to thank my friends Robert Berman, Ronna Burger, Michael Davis, Drew Keller, Martin Sitte, and Barbara Witucki for helping me to formulate these reflections.

16 1 The Beginnings Theodicy Both the Iliad and the Odyssey are about suffering. The suffering Achilles wrath inflicted on the Achaeans is in the announcement of the theme of the Iliad, and the suffering Odysseus underwent at sea is equally prominent in the proem to the Odyssey. The partisan perspective of the Iliad s beginning, as if there were no suffering on the Trojan side, alters in the course of the poem and, in ending with the funeral of Hector, stands clear finally of any bias. In the Odyssey, however, the suffering depicted hardly extends beyond the immediate family of Odysseus; it certainly does not include the suitors in its compassion. That the suitors are more unjust than the Trojans is not an easy position to defend; so at least at the start one should perhaps acknowledge Homer s greater support of Odysseus than of Achilles. Homer after all allows Odysseus to tell a large part of his own song, and he does not grant that privilege to any other character. The songs Achilles sang are not recorded, and they were not in any case about himself. The Odyssey, then, seems to be much harsher than the Iliad. It seems to share in Odysseus s wrath more than the Iliad does in Achilles. No one in the Iliad dies in pain; Eurymachus, the second most prominent of the suitors, feels pain in his heart as he strikes the ground with his forehead (22.87). Even an enhancement of death as apparently slight as Purple death covered his eyes does not occur in the Odyssey. No one in the Iliad, for all the threatening talk about it, is eaten by either birds or dogs; but in the Odyssey a disloyal servant is cut up and fed to the dogs of the household ( ). With apparent disregard of the incalculable effects such cruelty might have, Odysseus encouraged if he did not exactly order his son and servants to carry out this act of revenge ( ). That Telemachus disobeys his father by refusing to give 1

17 2 Chapter One twelve servant girls a clean death does not bode well for the future rule of this prince for whom his father did so much ( ). Regardless of how these facts must be ultimately understood, they seem to be not unconnected with the beginning of the Iliad and underline the necessity for us to think the two poems together. Homer tells us at the start that Achilles wrath thrust many souls of heroes into Hades, and left themselves or their bodies as a feast for dogs and birds; but the Muse declines to acknowledge the truth of what Homer knows. Instead, we are given in the penultimate book Achilles experience that the soul after all is something in Hades, and in the last book the giving back of Hector s body for burial. The Muse separates the experience of the soul s existence from the divine law of burial, which does not automatically follow from that experience: Achilles has to be ordered to stop trying to disgrace Hector s corpse. 3 In the Odyssey, however, though Odysseus sees many Achaeans in Hades, he does not see any Trojans. Priam is not there to tell him about his death at the hands of Achilles son. There is, then, at least as much pity and terror in the Odyssey as in the Iliad,eveniftheIliad consoles us more by what it hides than the Odyssey can with its apparently greater openness about the dark side of things. 4 Achilles and Odysseus are each given a choice. Achilles believes he can either go home and die in old age or stay at Troy and be killed with great glory; Odysseus believes he can either go home or stay with Calypso and become deathless and ageless forever. What Achilles finally chooses is shown to be as inevitable and right as what Odysseus does, and since glory seems to be a weaker version of what Odysseus rejects (cf. XII ), we are allowed to infer that Achilles would have accepted Calypso s offer and Odysseus would have sailed home from Troy. 5 Indeed, Achilles seems to tell Odysseus in Hades that he made the wrong choice ( ), but we are not told that Odysseus had any regrets. The power of Homer s poetry, in any case, largely consists of persuading us that the morality of either choice of Achilles in rescuing the Achaeans from a dire situation and of Odysseus in saving the life of his son and putting a stop to Penelope s tears is overshadowed by the fatefulness of either choice. We are forced to look at justice from a perspective beyond justice, even if neither Achilles nor Odysseus ever came to such an understanding. It is here, in the difference between Odysseus s self-understanding and Homer s understanding of that self-understanding, that Homer possibly parts company with Odysseus and recovers a point of view as much beyond good and evil as he assumed so readily in the Iliad. How Achilles comes to put on his fate is shown for the most part in the events of the Iliad; we do not have and we do not need to have Achilles own account.

18 The Beginnings 3 Our access to the grounds for Odysseus s choice, which he already made before Homer picks up his story, can only come from Odysseus himself. He has to explain from the inside, as it were, what was involved in his coming home. What Homer tells us at the outset makes Odysseus s choice a riddle. 6 Whereas the Iliad begins with the names of Achilles and his father, and thus singles him out and roots him in a past, the Odyssey begins with a man in whom anonymity is coupled with knowledge: he wandered very far, saw the cities of many men, and came to know their mind. Odysseus s own experiences and understanding of those experiences are the equivalent of Achilles genealogy. They make him his own man and cut him loose from both his father and fatherland. Even when Odysseus s name is finally given (1.21), it is without his father s. 7 Virgil goes even further with his protagonist; Aeneas is not named until the ninety-second line of the first book. The initial namelessness of Aeneas indicates that Odysseus s namelessness is not unambiguous, for in Aeneas s case it suggests both the subordination of the man to the city he sets out to found and the ultimate vanishing of the Aeneadae into the Romans, as Juno demands, and hence the impossibility that Virgil s fiction ever be realized ( ; cf ). Odysseus s homecoming, on the other hand, whereby Homer allows himself to call Odysseus by his father s name only once before he returns home (8.18), is shadowed by his own claim to anonymity insofar as he understands himself as nothing but mind: Odysseus s heart laughs when he realizes that No One (outis) the name he gave to himself and Mind (mētis) deceived the Cyclopes ( ). He is the double form of No one, outis and mētis, together. This deep-rooted pun, which represents the degree to which Odysseus accepts and agrees with Homer s starting point, is in tension with the first of Odysseus s stories after he leaves behind the aftermath of the Trojan War. He tells the Phaeacians that he came to the land of the Lotus-eaters, who though harmless had a plant that made anyone who ate of it forget all thought of returning home; and Odysseus had to use force to get his men back to their ships. Odysseus, then, begins his account by affirming the primacy of memory only to follow up that affirmation with the anonymity of mind. Odysseus s return home thus seems to be not an unqualified return. There is, on the one hand, no possibility of his ruling his people as he did before the Trojan War (his gentleness as of a father is gone forever once he is prepared to kill a large minority of the Ithacans); and, on the other hand, he must once he gets home soon depart, staying perhaps no longer than a month (cf ), and come once more to many cities of mortals (23.267). The Odyssey catches Odysseus between

19 4 Chapter One a return and a departure. Odysseus s choice, then, seems to point not so much to home as to mortality. Odysseus chooses to be human and remain incomplete; or he understands there to be a completeness in the incompleteness of a certain kind of human life that is preferable to either the fixity of memory or the everlastingness of divinity. Achilles second thoughts, which he expresses to Odysseus in Hades, are in harmony with Odysseus s choice, not so much perhaps because he would now prefer to be the lowest of the low but because he would wish to live again even though it be for a short time provided he could defend his father from violence and make those who dishonor Peleus loathe their own strength ( ). In the last book, Odysseus effects a kind of reconciliation with his father whose rule he had taken over in some unknown way. The paternal rule that prevailed in Ithaca before the Trojan War and exemplified the highest possible achievement within the ancestral was gained only by a usurpation. That usurpation, which had the consequence of preventing Laertes from defending Penelope from the suitors, merely confirms the riddle in Odysseus s choice. Odysseus s former rule was only in appearance traditional; he had broken with the equation of the good with the ancestral long before he had been given the possibility of not following in the ways of the fathers. The struggle between natural and ancestral right, with which the Iliad begins, had already been settled in Ithaca in favor of the son, though the son, as Athena reminds Telemachus, is rarely superior to his father ( ). Odysseus s return demands violence in order to reestablish a principle that had been so effortlessly acknowledged the first time. After twenty years, that first time has been largely forgotten. Perhaps one ought to say that the very effortlessness of Odysseus s first monarchy obscured the principle on which it rested; but since the terror that goes along with the restoration obscures the principle no less, one is puzzled once more about how to understand the relation between Odysseus s wisdom and Odysseus s choice. Now that Odysseus s pre-trojan wisdom has been so radically altered as to have at its core the knowledge of nature (10.303), what was originally an accidental coincidence of power and wisdom will have to be replaced by the conscious effort to put them together; but the terrible consequences of that effort would seem to deny the desirability of their coincidence. Homer seems to have reflected on the Platonic possibility of philosopherkings, and either condemned it in advance of its explicit formulation or confirmed the necessity that its realization remain a devout wish. These preliminary reflections on the beginning of the Odyssey do not in any way exhaust it. They have been particularly deficient in regard to two not unrelated issues, the gods and human wickedness. Homer singles

20 The Beginnings 5 out for mention Odysseus s struggle to save the lives of his men for the return home, and his failure to do so, for in their reckless folly they ate the cattle of the Sun, and the Sun took away the day of their return (1.5 9). Homer puts the stress on the return of Odysseus s men and not on his own. Odysseus s choice, then, is not entirely free, and the opposition between memory and mind might be less operative than it seemed. Homer, however, has chosen an event after Odysseus s twelve ships had been reduced to one, and there is nothing in Odysseus s own account to warrant the view that everyone who lost his life was the victim of his own wickedness. Had it not been for Odysseus s use of force, those who wanted to remain with the Lotus-eaters would have survived. Homer, moreover, gives the impression that the Sun punished Odysseus s men; but we are later told that the Sun cannot punish individual men; he can withdraw his light from gods and men equally, but he needs Zeus to carry out what alone would satisfy him ( ). Homer does not mention Zeus. If we may distinguish between cosmic gods like the Sun gods whose possible existence is manifest to sight and Olympian gods, about whom there is only hearsay, 8 then Homer begins with a cosmic god who punishes human folly, but he is at once corrected as soon as the Muse takes over and introduces Homer and us to Poseidon, Zeus, and Athena. Homer on his own suggests that Odysseus s wisdom and justice are supported by the cosmic gods, who no less exact terrible vengeance for injustice and folly. That this suggestion is not confirmed by the Muse to whom Homer hands over the story seems to imply that Odysseus, in choosing to return home, chooses the Olympian gods. It is Odysseus s men who promise if they return safely to build a temple to the Sun ( ). Homer combines his description of Odysseus with a request to the Muse to begin the story at some point or other (1.10). 9 Had the Muse taken him as literally as we have, the story would have begun with either Odysseus s ninth adventure the island of the Sun or, if we take the echo of Homer s words about the cities of many men in Odysseus s account to his wife about his last voyage (23.267), the Odyssey would have told of how Odysseus came across a people who did not know the sea and established a sacrifice to a god whom they did not know. The Muse does not take up either of these possibilities; instead, she goes farther back and makes Poseidon, for an unknown reason, responsible for Odysseus being the last of those who survived the Trojan War to return home ( ). In telling about the man who wandered very far, the Muse is given much leeway. The Odyssey we have does not exhaust Odysseus. In light of the precise starting point of the Iliad, there is nothing more to Achilles than his

21 6 Chapter One wrath, and with its end the poem about him is over. The burial of Achilles forms a part of the end of the Odyssey; it is of no importance to the Iliad. This apparent difference, however, between the concentrated doom of Achilles and the indeterminateness of where in his life Odysseus would best show himself it is in any case not in the time of the Trojan War needs to be qualified. Although Homer seems to ask the Muse in the Iliad to start from the plan of Zeus, the Muse starts from Apollo, whose anger at Agamemnon provoked the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, and there is no indication that Zeus was behind Apollo s actions. Even in the Iliad, then, the causal nexus of events is complicated through the actions of independent gods. Homer s choice of the episode about the cattle of the Sun thus seems particularly felicitous, for once one goes further back, the strands of divine causality become ever more complex and ultimately dribble out into Odysseus s fate that he knew more than twenty years before the Odyssey begins ( ). The clarity Homer gains about the connection between justice and wisdom by simplifying the story seems not only to have a narrative advantage but also to support completely Zeus s contention that men blame the gods for their own evils while in fact they alone are responsible, by their own reckless wickedness Zeus simply repeats Homer s own phrasing (1.7, 34) for the suffering they have beyond their fate. 10 The poem confirms the first half of Zeus s contention absolutely: there is hardly anyone who does not fault the gods and in particular Zeus. Odysseus has no sooner escaped from the Cyclops s cave than a failure of a sacrifice prompts him to assert that Zeus was then planning how all his ships and men were to perish ( ). We thus have the paradox that Homer begins by vindicating Zeus without involving Zeus, and the Muse who sets out to correct Homer vindicates the human understanding of divine causality through the very admissions Zeus himself makes. 11 It would not be reasonable to expect that this initial paradox will be allowed to stand, but rather that the story we have will ultimately show Zeus to be in the right. We can also suspect that Zeus has chosen Odysseus to be his agent in a knockdown proof of Olympian theodicy. It is through Odysseus s way of disguising and revealing himself that Laertes is made to declare that the Olympian gods still exist (24.351). Politics The vindication of Olympian theodicy begins in a mysterious manner. 12 After we have been told about Calypso s detention of Odysseus and Po-

22 The Beginnings 7 seidon s unremitting anger against him, it is strange for Zeus to recall blameless Aegisthus two years after his death ( ), and use him to illustrate his thesis, that the gods are blameless for human evils, and all the suffering that is beyond fate is due to a man s own reckless wickedness. If the criminal was so coddled that only a warning of retribution could possibly have deterred him, why wasn t Agamemnon equally warned against him? And what kind of retribution can it be that compels the son to avenge the father by killing the mother ( )? Telemachus is reasonably puzzled by Athena s citation of Orestes as the model for his own course ( ; ): 13 no suitor has yet killed his father or seduced his mother. Zeus s self-justification also fails to absolve the gods of human suffering short of death; for when he acknowledges that Poseidon is the cause of Odysseus s wandering, he seems to believe that since Poseidon did not kill Odysseus he is not culpable (1.75; cf ). Odysseus, however, is fated to return home ( ); so if the only evil for which a god can be held responsible is a nonfated death, Zeus s apology does not amount to much. Homer s own example, the self-willed destruction of Odysseus s men ( ), seems far better chosen; but if Odysseus was fated to return home alone and lose all his men ( ), Homer did not do any better than Zeus in vindicating the ways of gods to men. If, however, the gist of both vindications amounts to this, the inevitable coincidence of necessity and will, then the human complaint against the gods is really a protest against the tragedy of life, for which the gods are apparently no more responsible than they are relevant. Athena seems to adopt a much more cheerful and vindictive view of Zeus s meditation on Aegisthus: Aegisthus, she says, lies in a wholly fitting ruin, and may anyone else who commits crimes like his so perish. Athena has no intention, we can already surmise, of warning the suitors (cf ); but as the issue of punishment is thus freed from its tragic significance, the justice of the suitors punishment becomes problematic. That they are to be killed Odysseus has known for seven years ( ); indeed, he knew it four years before they came to besiege Penelope, though he did not know that his knowledge anticipated the event. A fouryear stay with Calypso, then, instead of seven, would have allowed Odysseus to return prior to the suitors arrival; and since Poseidon s anger is completely discharged after he stirs up a single storm against Odysseus ( ), Poseidon cannot really be the sole obstacle to Odysseus s delayed return. The apparently empty time that Odysseus must spend with Calypso is dictated no less by the need for Telemachus to grow up and experience fully the indignity of his position than by the need for Polyphemus s curse, which provided for Odysseus to meet with sufferings at

23 8 Chapter One home (9.535), to be realized. Neither Zeus nor Athena mentions any of this. The only nonfated event involves Telemachus achievement of maturity, of which Teiresias in Hades tells Odysseus nothing. It would seem, then, that the gods causality as well as their justice concerns Telemachus, and that the so-called Telemacheia is not an appendage to the Odyssey but the other way around: the Odyssey serves the Telemacheia, at least to the extent that its primary issue is theodicy. Had the suitors come one year after the Trojan War and Odysseus been allowed to return three years after that, everything that fate required would have been satisfied except for the twenty years that had to pass before Odysseus could return home. Without that condition, it is hard to believe that Odysseus s reappearance all by itself would not have at once scattered the suitors, who are shown to be a bunch of bumbling braggarts and scarcely a match for Odysseus. That Telemachus never has to explain to the suitors why he removed the arms and armor from the dining hall Odysseus had prepared for him a plausible speech ( ) shows as nothing else how small a threat they are in themselves. Even if the suitors could not have been dislodged without a fight, Odysseus could certainly have dispersed them without Telemachus, whose main contribution to the killing is a mistake that added for a moment to his father s troubles ( ). We are forced, then, back to the central position Telemachus occupies in the timing and character of the suitors punishment. Telemachus represents the political problem of succession. Penelope s entire effort for twenty years has been to preserve the throne for her son, and for the last years to distract attention from the succession by dazzling the suitors with her own attractions and making it seem that the household and not the city is at stake. Telemachus knows nothing of this. When he is directly asked whether he has called an assembly for a political reason he denies it ( ). Telemachus, then, is hardly less resentful of his mother than of the suitors. The real issue of his right to the succession appears to him in the spurious form of a doubt about the legitimacy of his birth ( ). In his so-called Archaeology, Thucydides speaks of the long period of upheaval, of stasis and exile, that followed the Trojan War ( ); 14 but for all that Telemachus sees firsthand at either Nestor s or Menelaus, life goes on there as it did before the war. Except for his son, Nestor seems to have lost not one of his army (3.7 8). Only in Ithaca has the war been completely devastating. An entire generation has been wiped out, not only in Ithaca but also in the other parts of Odysseus s small empire (II ). The evident usurpation within Odysseus s palace has covered over this central fact; and the suspension of all political life for twenty

24 The Beginnings 9 years no one has called an assembly in all that time ( ) seems to have suspended time itself. Telemachus s coming of age and the death of Odysseus s dog Argus are the only measures of real time left. Odysseus s rule was so beneficent, it seems, that it could seal up Ithaca for twenty years and allow it to run for that long without a ruler. That there is no ruler shows up only in a reputed disorder within Odysseus s own household ( ; ). On his departure, Odysseus turned over the management of his house to Mentor, but he left no provision for the care of the city ( ). There had once been a council of elders in Laertes time, but with Odysseus s rule it seems to have ceased (21.21). Penelope s daily weaving and nightly unraveling of Laertes shroud may be said to represent the uneventfulness of Odysseus s almost perfect ordering. It could not last. That gratitude could survive seventeen years if we count the suitors arrival as the sign of its fading from the people s memory is miraculous enough; one cannot expect it to be transmitted from one generation to the next without hope ( ): the loyal Eumaeus, who is too reverent to name his master even in his absence, still hopes for a reward ( , ). The suitors, then, whose older brothers and cousins went with Odysseus to Troy (cf ), contain in themselves the general disaffection of the people (cf ). They make it possible for Odysseus to cut out surgically the most deeply infected part of the body politic ( ) we learn in the last book that he did not cut deeply enough ( ; cf ) and hand over the city in a sound enough condition for a Telemachus to rule it. 15 Whether the other parts of the empire would have to be left to drift away is still up in the air at the end of the Odyssey, but the signs are ominous ( ). The political problem Odysseus confronts reminds one of an imaginary situation Plato s Athenian Stranger presents to a Cretan and a Spartan. 16 He supposes that a single father and a single mother have many sons, most of whom are unjust, but the minority is just; and if a judge could be found for these brothers, the question he poses is who would be a better judge, one who destroyed everyone who was bad and ordered the better to rule themselves, or one who would make the good be the rulers, and the worse, whom he would allow to live, be ruled voluntarily. To this straightforward choice, the Stranger adds a third, the judge who takes over a single family at odds with itself, kills no one, and by the laying down of laws reconciles them for the future, and makes sure they are friends with one another. Odysseus seems to have pursued the first course on his own, and to have been ordered by the gods to follow it up with the third ( ). Perhaps it is true that resentment can fade as easily as gratitude, and if Odysseus s absence is as long the second time as it was the first, Odysseus

25 10 Chapter One may well die old at home surrounded by a happy people ( ). Behind the supposed ingratitude of Odysseus s people, however, there lies a smoldering resentment, fueled not by his long absence, but by the universal recognition that if Odysseus does return he returns alone ( ). The father of Antinous puts it strongly and irrefutably: First, he went and lost his ships and his people, and then he returned and killed the best of the Cephallenians ( ). Odysseus could not possibly have returned after his ninth adventure without being torn apart and eaten alive; for had he tried out at home the tale that went over so well among the naive Phaeacians, he would have condemned himself out of his own mouth, even if there is a higher justification for everything he did and did not do. Odysseus s story is not fit for Ithacan ears. His seven-year withdrawal from the world now seems to be that which saved his life, not from Poseidon but from his own people. It may well be that public opinion forced Odysseus to go to Troy; in one of his many lies he mentions that it did so compel the Cretan he pretends to be ( ); but a people who forget their gratitude are not likely to remember their responsibility. Odysseus s compulsory withdrawal, in any case, recalls the prudence of Thucydides Demosthenes, who after a far less disastrous campaign chose to stay away from Athens until he could report a major success (3.98.5). One wonders whether the gifts Odysseus receives from the Phaeacians, which Zeus wants to be greater than what would have been his share had he returned unscathed from Troy ( ), are meant to be distributed to the Ithacans and compensate them for their losses (cf ; ). From the strictly political point of view I have outlined, the question of the suitors guilt, whether collectively or individually, and if there is guilt, whether the punishment fits the crime, would be largely irrelevant (cf ). If Odysseus is to rescue Telemachus from an intolerable position, he must do what he does, even if he could not have brought himself to carry out his fate without believing, as he says, that the suitors refused to honor any human being, whoever came to them, base no less than noble, and on account of their reckless wickedness they met their unseemly fate ( ). He certainly does not believe, in any case, as Penelope does, that there never yet have been any men as obviously wicked and insolent as the suitors ( ). It is another question whether Odysseus s action, being as it is that which founds the new political order, would not necessarily come to be viewed on Penelope s terms, with consequences for the understanding of morality that we are not yet in a position to calculate.

26 The Beginnings 11 Telemachus The two parts of Athena s plan seem to move at cross-purposes: the son is sent away from home just before the father sets out on his way home. But Athena accomplishes at least two things through the departure of Telemachus. She makes him appear to be a threat to the suitors, so they will be forced to plan his murder, and she makes Telemachus begin to care more for the father he never knew than for the property he regards as his and that he sees being consumed before his eyes. 17 Telemachus s public denunciation of the suitors, though it does not have any immediate effect (cf ) a suitor closes the assembly Telemachus summoned (2.257) when it is combined with his secret departure, seems to point to the possibility of a second expedition of the Achaeans to support once again the integrity of the household and guest-friendship against their violation ( ). Just as Penelope seems to be more deserving of esteem than Helen, so the rights of the case are clearer than they ever were in the Trojan War. Although there are allusions to a widening of the conflict throughout the Odyssey, and the alternative of an open struggle is built into Teiresias s prophecy (11.120), Telemachus never discusses it with either Nestor or Menelaus, and they do not make the offer. 18 Odysseus mentions it only when he is lying (14.330). The possibility of a joint expedition died with Agamemnon, and if his death were not fated, one might be led to suppose that it was not entirely displeasing to Zeus and Athena. The re-isolation of cities, so that the issue of their internal order becomes more important than their foreign relations, looks as if it belongs to the wider scheme of things; and it is only an apparent paradox that the instrument for bringing it about should be the man who wandered very far. This re-isolation, which the premise of the Odyssey the illusory domestication of a political problem most obviously expresses, is symbolized by two events, one on the level of deed, the other of speech. The immediate consequence of the Phaeacians safe conveyance of Odysseus to his home is Alcinous s decision, after Poseidon, at Zeus s suggestion, has turned the returning ship into stone, to suspend for the future their escort service ( ). There will no longer be any easy communication by sea. The second sign of what lies in store is this. While Telemachus and Athena are conversing, Phemius is singing of the sad return of the Achaeans ( ). We do not get to hear this song, which by the very nature of its being one song would have had a single perspective in its narrative; instead, we get to hear three different stories about the Achaeans return, told respectively by Nestor, Menelaus, and Odysseus,

27 12 Chapter One that do not form a coherent whole. Though their stories touch upon one another and are not, in broad outline, mutually inconsistent, there is no common aim that unites them. A single account of the breakup of a once coherent expedition disappears behind the individual interests and understanding of its former participants. There is no longer a central authority for either a common action or a common speech. Everyone is now to keep to himself and put his own stamp on events. Athena comes to Ithaca in the guise of a stranger, Mentes, the leader of the Taphians (1.105). Since no one in town has ever met the son of Odysseus s friend of twenty years ( , , ), Athena looks like Mentes because she says she is Mentes; she could have said she was any other stranger without changing her appearance in any way. On this occasion alone, she is anyone and someone at the same time. Telemachus spots her first because he has been imagining in his mind s eye his noble father and supposing, What if he were to return from somewhere or other and disperse the suitors? ( ). Inasmuch as Athena is holding a spear in her hand when she arrives on the threshold of the courtyard, Telemachus s imagination and Telemachus s sight seem to merge: Athena leaves her spear behind among Odysseus s weapons when she departs as suddenly as she came ( ); Telemachus tells her that she speaks as kindly as a father to his son ( ). Telemachus, moreover, begins by making a mistake; as he goes across to greet Athena, a righteous indignation stirs him a stranger had been left standing at the entrance so long ( ). 19 Athena, however, had just shot down from Olympus, and no one is at fault. The private conversation Telemachus and Athena then have occurs after the suitors have dined and are listening in silence to Phemius ( ); but this does not prevent Athena from telling Telemachus that the suitors seem to her as if they were hubristic in their arrogance, and any man of sound understanding would be stirred to righteous indignation were he to see their overwhelming shamelessness ( ). Athena s insight into the suitors is no doubt true; but the transparency of the suitors to her, which anticipates the evidence we are given for the insight, seems to warrant and possibly encourage, on the part of men, a fusion of imagination and evidence that, in becoming a terrifying certainty, would always be triggered to condemn. When Athena later stands by Odysseus and urges him to go begging among the suitors, in order that he may know who are righteous and who lawless, everyone proves to be in some sense righteous except Antinous, and he is universally upbraided by the suitors themselves ( ). Athena may have wanted Odysseus to realize the limits of human knowledge of the human heart; but whether he took the lesson to heart is an open question. It is certain, however, that Athena did not even try to teach it to anyone else.

28 The Beginnings 13 Before Athena/Mentes comes around to giving Telemachus a complex set of instructions, 20 she puts an account of Odysseus s visit inside her wish that Odysseus appear among the suitors as he once stood at her father s (Anchialos s) door ( ). He had come to get a deadly poison for his arrows after the king of Ephyra had turned down his request: In his righteous indignation, he was in awe of the gods who are forever (1.263). We learn much later that Odysseus never took his bow to war ( ); so even in the time when Odysseus s rule was as gentle as a father s he sought to have an edge against his domestic enemies (cf ): he could have taken them out in poor light, and his aim would not have to have been deadly to be deadly. 21 While Athena hints that there are ways for Telemachus to dispose of the suitors even if Odysseus is dead the suitors know about the possibility of obtaining poison from Ephyra but not from the Taphians ( ) she uses the friendly appearance of a fully armed Odysseus on her father s doorstep as the basis for a wish that he kill the suitors. Athena implies that she saw right through Odysseus to the deadly purpose of his visit, or that at least in Odysseus s case one could not tell friend and enemy apart. 22 Athena, moreover, inserts within the martial picture of Odysseus a less noble one, and that insertion implies that one must choose human friendship over against divine nemesis: her father loved Odysseus terribly and gave him the poison (1.264). The blurring of the difference between friend and enemy goes along with the overthrow of any divine constraints on human action. We really are in a postheroic world: when they are at home, neither Telemachus nor Odysseus is called a hero. 23 When they are preparing for the final battle, Odysseus tells his son that he is now facing the kind of struggle where the best are judged, and he should not disgrace the race of his fathers. Telemachus assures him that he will not, and then Laertes calls the gods his friends the only time anyone ever does so and rejoices that son and grandson are competing about virtue. 24 But neither Telemachus nor Odysseus kills anyone in this open fight; the rejuvenated hero Laertes gets the privilege of hurling the first and last spear of the war ( ; cf , , ). As the Taphian Mentes, Athena is a trader in the new metal, iron; she is bringing it to men who speak a foreign language and offer bronze in exchange ( ). Athena/Mentes says she came because she heard that Odysseus had returned ( ); but the gods, she goes on to say, are baffling his way, and wild and savage men hold him prisoner on a seagirt island. It is an odd description of Calypso, who uses only speeches to make Odysseus forget Ithaca ( ), but it suits the gods to whom Athena vaguely ascribes the cause of Odysseus s detention. She implies that men alone

29 14 Chapter One could not detain the wily Odysseus. That the gods are remote savages seems to be in accord with the human experience of the gods; but it is not clear why Athena should want to suggest anything of the sort to Telemachus. She must know that Telemachus, who comes to know in his heart that Mentes was Athena (1.420), once he learns about Calypso from Menelaus ( ), will put two and two together and draw this conclusion. Is Athena planning a revolution among the gods no less than a greater independence of men from the gods (cf )? Is the denigration of the gods part and parcel of checking the human impulse to attribute all their evils to the gods? To the extent that Athena distances herself from the savage gods and has given the go-ahead to the use of any means for the punishment of enemies, she has laid the groundwork for a new religion, with herself at its head (cf , ). What form this new religion will take cannot even be imagined at this point, anymore than we now know whether she is going to succeed. But we do know that her conversation with Telemachus prevented him from hearing from Phemius how Athena enjoined a sad return on the Achaeans ( , ). While Phemius is singing about Athena as a more remote cause than any we have heard about so far, we are witnesses to how the goddess really works as a cause. We can imagine if we want that at the very moment Athena sets out Orestes as the model Telemachus is to follow, Phemius has just finished the story of Agamemnon s murder; but we know from Athena s speech to Telemachus that it is the killing of Aegisthus that grounds the killing of the suitors, and the justification for Aegisthus s death consists in the glory Orestes obtained among all men. Athena gets inside the head of Telemachus, and when Telemachus expresses the new confidence she has instilled, it comes out in three ways: he mentions the name of his father for the first time (1.355), contradicts his mother, and defends singers. Unlike you, he tells Penelope, I can take it when I hear the evil fate of the Danaans Odysseus was not the only one who perished and, without quite being conscious of it, the hidden message is: I want to be celebrated for the killing of the suitors their evil fate for I soon will be the subject of song, since men always like to hear the latest news (cf ; ). Telemachus learns from Athena that no glory is attached to the reacquisition of one s property. One has to think big, and that entails the wiping out of all the suitors; a simple dispersion will no longer do. That some extraordinary transformation takes hold of Telemachus is virtually certain from the way he botches Athena s instructions; what she gave as private advice (1.279), he blurts out before the suitors and tops it with the wish that they all die in his house and he not